By Larry Fitzmaurice
on October 22, 2010 at 12:15 p.m. EDT

The 2010 CMJ Music Marathon, which takes over venues throughout New York City through Saturday night, continued for its third day. Stay tuned to Pitchfork News for photos and reviews throughout the festival.

After a night of show-going that made me reconsider whether I ever wanted to see live music again, the Secretly Canadian/Jagjaguwar/Dead Oceans showcase at the tiny performance room in the back of the too-trendy bar Pianos was a welcome change of pace. The Bloomington, Indiana label family continues to grow with an impressive stable of artists whose first band practice was seemingly earlier than the day before the show (something which probably couldn't be said for many bands at CMJ).

It's also representative of a larger change on the business end of indie music: whereas there used to be a multitude of small labels with a few artists to suit their specializations, nowadays the bigger indies (Matador, Sub Pop, Rough Trade, Merge, SC/Jag, etc.) are accumulating a large pool of talent representing a breadth of sound. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing for indie culture at large is arguable, depending on where your ethos lie. But it's hard to deny that these labels aren't curating impressive rosters underneath their increasingly wide-reaching umbrellas.

If you were standing at the back of the Mercury Lounge when Lia Ices and her band took the stage, you might have missed the singer-songwriter altogether. She sat at a small keyboard stage left, with a floppy hat shielding her face from the lights. Throughout the show, she conveyed a particular shyness that might explain her insistence on a pseudonym.